>>54437467Welo! After route 6,11 and the SS Anne, I evolved into Charizard before fighting Surge...And I haven't even used the 3 rare candies in my bag yet. Third gym was really easy to: didn't even damage me. I could keep going, but I accomplished what was set out to do: I'm 13 levels above the 3rd boss of the game with no additional grinding; only the trainer fights intentionally designed to up your levels by Game freak.
In conclusion, while OP is correct in being able to have Charizard before Surge, I think it's disingenuous to imply that the first 2 gym leaders are a breeze when souly using the Charmander line. Brock relied on good RNG without switching to other party members and while I beat Misty the first time, it could have easily gone bad had the accuracy RNG for the mega moves not been in my favour. Speaking of, Charmeleon evolved on the SS Anne, so you could very well have Starmie before Misty if you wanted.
When it comes to the argument of the EXP all. While both suffer from the issue of "why ever use more than 1 Pokemon LMAO!" I will argue that the older games do it slightly better as I said in another reply: In order to evolve or learn level up moves in older games, they NEED to participate. Not to mention that EVs are shared in addition to exp in the newer games with your only option being to deposit all but 1 Pokemon into the PC. (Obviously you don't need EVs for Pokemon's story mode, but the new exp share doesn't help in that regard either).
